The smoking gun

The jig is up, Ratzo. You’re busted. The lawyers are compiling their briefs as we speak. You haven’t got so much as a toenail to stand on. The pretty gold baubles and the sumptuous embroideries are going to be turned into cash to pay the damages. You’re not going to have the fund to go swanning around the globe telling us all what to do.

A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland’s Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police…

The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that the church in Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. It instead emphasizes the church’s right to handle all child-abuse allegations, and determine punishments, in house rather than hand that power to civil authorities.

Those pesky US lawsuits will be rolling in thick and fast now, dude, and they’ll win, on account of how your organization was stupid enough and smug enough to give written instructions to obstruct justice.

Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the 1997 letter should demonstrate, once and for all, that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but ordered by them.

Making Ratzinger’s ridiculous whited sepulchre nonsense about how distressed and off his feed he was even more ridiculous than it already was. “Oh I’m tho upthet that you did what we ordered you to do, oh how can I bear it, oh oh oh the agony.”

Joelle Casteix, a director of U.S. advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, described the letter as “the smoking gun we’ve been looking for.”

Casteix said it was certain to be cited by victims’ lawyers seeking to pin responsibility directly on the Vatican rather than local dioceses. She said investigators long have sought such a document showing Vatican pressure on a group of bishops “thwarting any kind of justice for victims.”

“We now have evidence that the Vatican deliberately intervened to order bishops not to turn pedophile priests over to law enforcement,” she said. “And for civil lawsuits, this letter shows what victims have been saying for dozens and dozens of years: What happened to them involved a concerted cover-up that went all the way to the top.”

It is outrageous and dangerous that Vatican officials block others who try to take the right action against abusive priests. Why on earth do they think we should believe them when claiming they are taking meaningful steps to prevent future child sex crimes and cover ups.One lie, creates another lie, and then another lie… But eventually the truth comes out.The fact that victims who have been harmed so deeply by predator priests, and then harmed again and again by those at the top, is unconscionable. Judy Jones, SNAP Midwest Associate Director USAsnapjudy@gmail.com“Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests”http://www.snapnetwork.org/

Next time I hear some whinge about how Catholics (or Christians in general) are victimized, I’ll think of this. I’m pretty sure that they’ll escape any sort of justice because they’re a church. It wouldn’t surprise me to see specific exclusions made in law (there are some already, if I’m not mistaken). Courts or no, legal exemptions or now, I think the weight of public opinion can be shifted with levers like this.

The Vatican does advise bishops worldwide to report crimes to police — in a legally nonbinding lay guide on its Web site. This recourse is omitted from the official legal advice provided by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and updated last summer. That powerful policymaking body continues to stress the secrecy of canon law.

Which suggests that there needn’t be anything out-of-date about the letter. The Vatican may still be ordering its officials not to report known rapists to the police. We have no way of knowing, given the “secrecy of canon law.”

That powerful policymaking body continues to stress the secrecy of canon law.

Another thing that hadn’t really struck me before regarding the Vatican’s claims to Statehood. Can anyone name me an example of another State which hides behind the need to keep its laws secret from its citizens? Pretty much all States keep certain aspects of policy secret and (while I think we’d be better off with a great deal more openness than we have) its probably necessary to the functioning of government that this happens. But laws?

Of course, arguably, canon law is nothing of the sort, merely a portentous name given to ‘church policy’ but if one concedes that, then there’s a certain mendacity in calling it law at all

I don’t know that the laws themselves are actually secret. This from the prestigious Wikipedia:

In the Roman Church, positive ecclesiastical laws, based upon either immutable divine and natural law, or changeable circumstantial and merely positive law, derive formal authority and promulgation from the pope, who as Supreme Pontiffpossesses the totality of legislative, executive, and judicial power in his person.[5] The actual subject material of the canons is not just doctrinal or moral in nature, but indeed all-encompassing of the human condition.

Apparently the laws aren’t that big a secret because seminarians have to study them:

Currently, all Latin-Rite Catholic seminary students are expected to take courses in canon law (c. 252.3). Some ecclesiastical officials are required to have the doctorate (JCD) or at least the licentiate (JCL) in canon law in order to fulfill their functions:

Maybe the “secrecy” of canon law refers more to the in-house process by which the Vatican deliberates certain matters (like who the next pope should be, or who gets to be a Cardinal and who doesn’t)—because that certainly does seem to be shrouded in secrecy.

Eh, don’t count on this changing much of anything. Might win a few more civil suits, might convince three or four more people to denounce the Vatican. But most everyone who was able to manage the cognitive dissonance already will keep managing it. And nobody will get prosecuted.

The Church has always been a ‘state within a state’, as Henry II discovered,to his cost. The status of the Vatican is not really the issue. I wouldn’t write the former Grand Inquisitor and his organization off prematurely,after all, they have a billion supporters. Sooner or later the tide will turn in the Church’s favor, as it always does.

The Vatican does advise bishops worldwide to report crimes to police — in a legally nonbinding guide on its website. This recourse is omitted from the official legal advice provided by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and updated last summer. That powerful policymaking body continues to stress the secrecy of canon law.

The central message of Storero’s letter was reported secondhand in the 2009 Dublin Archdiocese report. The letter itself, marked “strictly confidential,” has never been published before.

This is not subtle hypocrisy by the Church. It is brazen. The interests of the clergy on this are completely opposed to those of their congregations and the Catholic laity worldwide. All that is needed now is for a single priest with access to Vatican correspondence and a conscience of his own to contact Wikileaks.

All that is needed now is for a single priest with access to Vatican correspondence and a conscience of his own to contact Wikileaks.

Exactly. Think of the damage this single document can do multiplied by hundreds or thousands.

And there is bound to be such a priest, most of them are decent (albeit confused) human beings. We get to see the power mad sociopaths that float to the top of the vatican but I don’t think they are representative of the rank and file clergy.

These guys don’t just think they have special authority within their organization, do they? They think they have special authority within humanity. Obstruction of justice doesn’t mean anything because sovereign justice doesn’t apply to them. You have to wonder how many murders have been covered up, aside from the one attempted in Arizona.

I can’t recommend his book “The Case of the Pope – Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse” enough.

I think the cultural zeitgeist is changing, It used to be the rcc could do no wrong and our police and judicial systems accorded them unwarranted respect and gave them free rein.

The times they are a changing, the church is not accorded automatic respect anymore in the media and it will take just one district attorney/prosecutor to pursue charges of obstruction of justice against a bishop or cardinal and the house of cards will come tumbling down.

And it could happen in one of those countries where the rcc wields secular power like Ireland or Poland. To the extent the population is in thrall to the church, a sense of betrayal can cause these same people to turn on their most cherished institution.

I for one await the day when the entire lot of child fuckers are behind bars.

Well it looks very likely that something will happen. According to the coverage, this letter is exactly what several US lawyers have been looking for in order to be able to proceed against the Vatican. We know the lawyers are there, and have mountains of depositions and throngs of witnesses. Now they have the crucial bit of evidence. Fur is going to fly!

It’s going to be like Belgium – cops coming in and ransacking the place, just as if priests and bishops had to obey the law like anyone else.

You reckon, OB? What about the discovery of a secret 1946 Vatican letter, ordering French church officials not to return Jewish children to their parents if they were baptized while under church protection, which has reignited the controversy over the World War II-era policies of Pope Pius XII, who is on the fast track to sainthood. Seems like the church has a history of cover ups concerning innocent children.

I suppose the Vatican could say it was an Anglican forgery – after all it might win over a few more helpless Anglican souls with women-priest phobias to the fold.

The vatican should be held accountable for this letter.

There are momentarily Vatican visitation prelates in Ireland going to various parishes and religious places snooping for information regarding horrendous child sex abuse and there is not much media attention. The Vatican is so clever – it will probably stash away the information it gets into secret vaults in Rome. It’ll doubtless use the fact finding clerical sexual abuse mission to the best of its own advantage. The Would You Believe Vatican Crimes (WYB) programme went out on Irish airwaves to coincide with the visitation. Nonetheless there are gargantuan governmental problems which have detracted from the whole child clerical sexual abuse debacle. The media is taken up with the latter. The Vatican visitors must be thrilled.

Why did the Vatican deal with sexual abuse of children in the Vatican? Is not a crime a crime a crime and should not crime always have been reported to the gardai in whatever country the crime took place? Canon law should not have any right to take precedence over criminal law.

The Vatican prevented bishops from removing abuser priests, thus causing Tony Walshe to go on and seriously abuse further children in a very working class parish in Ballyfermot, not too far from Goldenbridge industrial school, Dublin. The Vatican has a lot to answer to abused children of the past for its diabolical carry-on. Shame on the Vatican. It should be stripped of its privileged status.

The bishops who followed the Irish child-protection policy and reported a priest’s suspected crimes to police ran the risk of having their in-house punishments of the priest overturned by the Congregation for the Clergy.

Isn’t it just despicable and stomach-churning to read that the Vatican has such power over extremely highly educated professors with philosophy and theology and psychology degrees and whatever other degrees they can muster under the holy starched garbs. Who can cow-tow and have the extraordinary privilege of kissing the ring of the holy pontifical hand, while knowing full well that the same holy man, who is successor of Peter, has ordered them to keep mum about ungracious, unholy ones who have sexually manhandled and raped innocent children of the poor working uneducated classes.

Irish child-protection policy meant nothing to the pope only self-preservation of the Vatican and self- protection of its own beloved ring kissing philosophy and theological professors.

The religious who abused working class children in institutions were also of the educated classes. Methinks there is a deeply psychological hidden hatred of some educated religious classes towards the unwashed working classes. Don’t some persecutors, who plunder countries firstly go for the weakest ones such as the women and children and isn’t it all about power. Power means raping children. Power means covering up the rape of children and power means having absolute control. Power means also education and its only when the powerless get education can they beat the ones who use it against them. Never the Twain shall meet till the weak ones are on the same level playing field.

The priest predators knew the playing fields to go to and it certainly wasn’t the ones belonging to educated students classes. It was invariably the downtrodden working class boggy fields they sought their prey.

Well,I’d like to share your optimism,I really would. However I’m dubious as to the lasting effects civil litigation in the common law systems around the world will have on the Church,its human resources and ability for renewal are enormous. After all we’re dealing with the world’s most enduring large scale (criminal?) organization and there are many devout Catholics in postions of influence, as Marie-Thérèse has pointed out. So my money’s on the Church.

If ever there’s a liquidation sale of the contents of the Vatican Library,I’ll be there.

Storero “warned that bishops who followed the Irish child-protection policy and reported a priest’s suspected crimes to police risked having their in-house punishments of the priest overturned by the Congregation for the Clergy.”

And Storero wasn’t wrong – the tale of Tony Walsh, one of the more notorious pedophiles, demonstrates that. He was fired in secret (Bad enough in itself, child abusers belong in jail not unemployment lines) but appealed to the Vatican, which reinstated him.

John Paul II, by the way, is going to be beatified. His guy sent that letter, his church had that policy so lets get the process started to saint him.

Not a smoking gun according to the CNN Senior Vatican Analyst John L. Allen Jr:

“It’s certainly an embarrassment for the Vatican,” said CNN Senior Vatican Analyst John L. Allen, Jr. “It’s another confirmation that, in the late 1990s, there was deep ambivalence in the Vatican about how far they should go in terms of reporting priestly sex abuse to civil authorities.”

But, he added, “It’s not a smoking gun because it is not a directive. Not an order. This is one Vatican official giving his opinion. It is not a policy document.”

It’s a high-ranking Vatican official relaying the sense of a panel that renders legal opinions.

That’s not the kind of thing that the bishops can disregard as one man’s opinion.

The “one Vatican official” is saying that the expert opinion in the Vatican is that the Irish policy is illegal by canon law, right? And that they should continue to hide things from the police and refer suspected pedophile priests to secret church courts instead, right?

There’s no mention that canon law is going to be changed, to allow the bishops to obey Irish law, is there?

In the decade after that, they didn’t get a differing opinion from the Vatican, did they? Canon law wasn’t changed, was it?

It seems to me that the Vatican is saying to the bishops “Sorry, you can’t do that, because of that pesky canon law; you must obey canon law above all, and that’s just how it is.”

As though the Vatican wasn’t responsible for canon law. “It’s not little old us telling you to do that—it’s those darned binding rules we made.”

It’s the whole corrupt shadow government system telling them to violate national and international law.

‘That’s not a smoking gun of course, it’s a smoking weapon of mass destruction.

That’s not a smoking gun of course, it’s a smoking weapon of mass destruction.

More like a smirking weapon of self-destruction. The old biblical quotation “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s…” (Matt. 22:21) has traditionally been used to argue that Christians should always obey the law of the land. Now comes the Vatican Rider: only when expedient. Otherwise, what’s right is what you can get away with.

How the Vatican can claim to have any moral authority left after this is beyond me. It’s a bit like the story the communist Harry Pollitt told about his time in Wandsworth Prison, where he was told by a fellow inmate (a professional burglar) ‘serves you bloody well right, you’ve no respect for private property’.

To paraphrase those immortal lines of Shiva (‘Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds’) as quoted by Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad Gita on the morning of the world’s first atomic explosion: ‘Now I am become a Catholic Priest, a shatterer of children’s lives.’

Because if the Vatican won’t turn the bastards over to the law, it is on the bastards’ side.

The bishops who followed the Irish child-protection policy and reported a priest’s suspected crimes to police ran the risk of having their in-house punishments of the priest overturned by the Congregation for the Clergy.

I didn’t understand the significance of this part of the article.

If suspected priests had been turned over to civil authorities then “in-house punishments” are a moot point, are they not ?

The letter does say that the Congregation for the Clergy will engage in a global study and will “not be remiss” in issuing concrete directives.” My impression is that it did NOT issue any concrete directives that changed anything—the relevant canon law and the Vatican’s interpretation thereof are still in place, and they still assert the right to trump civil law by handling things in-house rather than reporting crimes to the police.

The letter seems to be a clear warning that

(1) the honchos in charge of disciplining priests, including Bishops—the Congregation for the Clergy—are definitely decided that the clergy must follow canon law where it conflicts with civil law, and that

(2) not only will administrative decisions like removing a pedophile from the priesthood be overturned by canon law (as in fact they later were, putting known pedophiles back in ministry, only to predictably rape children again), but

(3) there will be “highly embarrassing and detrimental” consequences of disobedience.

That seems pretty clearly an order by higher ups. The <i>papal nuncio</i> is delivering a warning that the people in a position to overrule bishops and make them regret their actions—The Congregation for Clergy—will do so if they stick to their reformist course of action.

It’s clearly putting the Bishops on notice that their overseers are not happy with them and they’d better back down, or they’ll be overruled, have their reversible decisions reversed (e.g., reinstating pedophiles), and be made to regret their non-reversible decisions (e.g., reporting pedophiles to civil authority as required by law).

This is about as direct an order as you should ever expect from your superiors in a bureaucracy. You can’t say you didn’t know what it meant, or didn’t know that it counted as an order. You might ask for a clarification about whether it really is an order to violate the law, but of course you won’t get a written answer. They’re not going to give you a letter from the Pope himself explictily ordering them to hide pedophiles from the police, in so many words. The Vatican is just making it absolutely clear that’s what the Bishops are expected to continue doing on pain of unspecified punishment.

I’m looking forward to court cases that establish that—that the Vatican is obviously lying when it says it “wasn’t an order,” and that it was exactly a criminal order to do things known to enable child rape.

“It’s not a smoking gun because it is not a directive. Not an order. This is one Vatican official giving his opinion. It is not a policy document.”

Archbishop Luciano Storero was Pope John Paul II’s (this is the guy on the fast track to sainthood by the way) envoy to Ireland. He was not “one Vatican official giving his opinion”, he was addressing the bishops of Ireland in his capacity as Papal Nuncio to Ireland.

This is the usual Vatican version of Whack-A-Mole, just try to pin them down on what their official position is (today).

<blockquote>If suspected priests had been turned over to civil authorities then “in-house punishments” are a moot point, are they not ?</blockquote>

They can’t overturn civil punishments, like a pedophile being sent to prison, but they can <i>and have</i> overruled Bishops’ decisions to remove priests from ministry, keep them away from children, etc.

That’s what happenend in the Tony Walsh case. (After the letter in question.) The bishops removed him from ministry after he abused enough kids, and it was clear he was a compulsive abuser, but the Vatican overruled them. The next year he got caught raping a kid in a pub restroom, and IIRC went to prison. (Presumably because civilians who turned him in to the civil authorities.)

Walsh is believed to have abused 100 or so kids, BTW, most of them long before the Vatican decided he should keep preaching and compulsively raping, over the objections of the Bishops. Whee.

Whether or not the letter in question was technically an order, it was pretty clearly an accurate statement of Church policy, and an attempt to ensure that that policy was complied with, in civilly criminal ways. No matter how you slice it, it was blatantly criminal and immoral.

What would be nice would be if Ireland was to issue a European arrest warrant for Luciano Storero.

I doubt the Vatican would hand him over, but it would stop him leaving the Vatican, as Italy would then be required to detain him, or if he is outside the EU, it would stop him from returning to Europe.

The trouble with this letter is that it doesn’t explicitly tell bishops not to report paedophile priests to the civilian authorities, it just expresses “serious reservations”. They always leave themselves just enough wiggle room to claim that they never meant what they clearly did mean, while at the same time making the Irish bishops in no doubt as to what was expected of them.

The Vatican then has the unbelievable hypocrisy to try to pin the sole blame on the Irish bishops. It’s just a complete coincidence that every other national bishop’s conference behanved in exactly the same way.

Whited fucking sepulchre. If it’s “misunderstood” then why didn’t the Vatican clear things up? Why not a follow-up letter saying “Oh dear please don’t misunderstand, we certainly didn’t mean you shouldn’t go to the police and do whatever else it takes to make sure this stops as of yesterday”?

Yes, Matt, if he were still alive, he undoubtedly would be protected to the hilt by the Vatican. Every time there were problems with bishops in Ireland in the past regarding child clerical sex abuse the bishops were whipped off like lightning to the Vatican. Nobody can touch them there. it is an ideal haven for them to hide from the prying eyes of the world. Italy, as its nearest neighbour, should do something to get rid of the Vatican.

The same was applicable with the Ryan Report. The religious abusers got away with blue murder.

I’ve been watching the RTE documentary on their Would You Believe? programme. This really is a bunch of self-serving, self-interested thugs. We hear that Benedict is making a change in the Vatican culture that allowed these things to happen. But I am not convinced. Nor, it seems, are the producers of the programme, who couldn’t get anyone from the Vatican to take part in the programme! Amazing. This will go on forever. What is most disturbing to me is to see the gang of men all dressed up in the finery, obviously a men’s cult, and there is no way that this is going to undergo change. It is not open to the ordinary commercy of daily life, and that is a recipe for continued secrecy. To imagine that an ‘incestuous’ group like this is going to bring about change is simply to imagine too much.

What amazes me is that there’s apparently not a single bishop pissed off enough with the Vatican’s treacherous blame game to testify against them.

I don’t believe it’s because they all think the pope is righteous, or that he can really excommunicate them and send them to Hell. No way.

I have to wonder if it’s because Ratzinger knows where all the bodies are buried, and that nobody gets to be a bishop without being controllable in that way—and nobody gets to be Pope without knowing where the bodies are buried and using that power to get elected.

That’s standard criminal conspiracy procedure—don’t trust anybody that you can’t destroy if they rat you out. If they won’t be complicit in a major crime you could rat them out for, they just don’t get in.

I increasingly suspect that’s how the Vatican has to work. The bodies are too numerous and the stakes are just too high for anybody not to collect aces for their own safety, and I’d that the only way to maintain that kind of blatantly immoral and criminal solidarity is with threats of mutual assured destruction in almost every direction.

(Yes, Ophelia, there is Omerta.)

I even have to wonder whether the Vatican can’t change the pedophelia thing without imploding, because it’s an essential tool for keeping the henchmen in line—if you haven’t done that, or been complicit in that, or done something equally heinous, they just can’t afford to trust you enough to let you become a bishop. There are just way too many bishops with way too much knowledge to accept any significant chance of betrayal from any of them, so you have to have a huge hold on each one, and can never, ever risk letting anybody with substantially cleaner hands into the club.

They all knew, all along, and if nobody’s saying so, everybody’s guilty of something very serious, as a matter of policy. Is there any other way to keep literally thousands of people quiet about such heinous things for at least several decades? (And presumably much longer.)

Which makes me wonder if it’s been exactly that corrupt for at least hundreds and hundreds of years, no later than the Borgia pope era anyhow. Once it gets that corrupt, and has to operate that way, doesn’t it, and how could you ever clean it up?

Hey, if you want to read about hundreds and hundreds (try thousands) of years of corruption, read Peter de Rosa’s Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy. de Rosa was a priest, but was laicised and got married (or perhaps it was the other way about). Anyway, it’s quite an eye-opener of a book.

As well as being very informative, it is also unexpectedly hilarious. The trials of the cadaver of Pope Formosus, and the triple crown of the papacy being split between three contending popes during the Western Schism will have you laughing out loud.

I found it very difficult to put this book down once I’d started reading it and have re-read it several times since.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor was being investigated by the BBC and the CPS in the UK several years ago about the 10 years when he was Bishop of Arundel and the worst paedophile priest, Michael Hill, was abusing regularly in his diocese. O’Connor knew he was doing this and just moved Hill around. In the end Hill was at Gatwick Airport abusing DISABLED children (I feel sick just thinking about it) These investigations were suddenly dropped, and last year O’Connor was offered a place in the House of Lords. Could it be that ‘secret catholic’ Tony Blair, and devout catholic Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, had something to do with this. Why is O’Connor not rotting in prison with his priest. He should certainly not be offered rewards. He also said on TV that atheists were ‘subhuman”. Coming from a man like him !!!!!! Shithead !!!! Lets hope they get back on his case although I doubt it. One sometimes wishes they were right about Hell as all of that lot would be there for sure.